Two years of building with AI
Used carefully, AI makes a budget go further. It doesn't replace an experienced developer. Here's how we use it.
Everybody building software with AI will tell you it's faster. It is. We've built with it in the loop for two years: our own platform and its iPhone app, an Android app, and the tooling that runs our servers.
So far that's our own work. Before we use it on yours, we'll talk to you about it first.
Faster at what, though? Producing code was never the hard part. The hard part comes eighteen months later, when somebody has to change that code and nobody can say why it looks the way it does. That's been our job since 2006, long before a machine was writing any of it.
What it's good for
Used well, AI takes on the slow, careful parts of the work: reading a large codebase, writing the tests round it, the first draft of a change. That leaves an experienced developer's time for the decisions, which is where your budget does the most good.
It doesn't know your organisation, your users or why the app was built the way it was. A developer who does still makes every call that matters.
Tests first
The model doesn't decide when it's done. The tests do.
Before an AI writes a change there's a test saying what the change has to do, and the test fails. Then the change is made and the test passes. When an external audit of Siftware Dev came back with four defects in August 2026, we reproduced every one as a failing test before we changed a line.
And a safety check that has never refused anything hasn't been tested. So we make ours refuse, on purpose, before we trust them.
A person on every change
Nothing an AI writes reaches production until a person has read it: read it, run it, and put their name to it.
What it costs
We record what our AI tools cost per task, beside the hours spent on the same job, so we can see where it saves time and where it doesn't.
Code somebody else's AI wrote
More and more, the app we're asked about has code an AI tool wrote, merged by somebody who's since moved on. We can read it, put tests round it, and tell you what's sound. Take it over
If you'd like to see if Siftware is a good fit for you and your project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.